Open-Source Cloud Hardware Grows Up Fast

Open Compute Project picks up key new members, sets more ambitious goals, and shows its multi-faceted, multi-chip side at annual summit.

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The Open Compute Project founded by Facebook has made rapid strides in what has been a narrow sphere of influence. The cloud is an x86 world, and, in its first three years, OCP has put out several motherboard and server designs for cloud projects.

The early adopters have been primarily big financial services companies, such as Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, and Goldman Sachs. At the Open Compute Project Summit this week in San Jose, Calif., OCP showed it may be ready to grow beyond one industrial segment into others, such as online gaming and pharmaceuticals, and expand the reach of open-source hardware in other ways.

OCP broadened its approach to licensing, as well. The hardware designs are available under an Apache Software Foundation-style of license, where the licensee may make modifications, sell them, and keep the additions proprietary. It's a "permissive" license, in the parlance of open-source. The adopter may do just about anything with the code without obligation. To encourage contributors, the Open Compute Project Foundation may move to a second model, a GPL-like license, where anyone may modify an Open Compute Project design, but if they sell a product based on it they must contribute their changes back to the community. The GPL governs Linux use. Its giveback clause makes it more restrictive, or "prescriptive," in how for-profit modifications must be handled.

It will require anyone who modifies an OCP design and then sells a product based on it "to contribute the modified version back to the foundation. It's our hope that having multiple licensing options will lead to even more OCP technology contributions," he wrote.

In another sign of maturity, OCP Summit speakers and panelists seemed to leave behind their references to converting thousands of servers and embraced both larger expectations and bigger numbers.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg got the process underway Tuesday by estimating that Facebook's efficient cloud server and datacenter designs had saved the company "more than a billion" dollars over the last three years, compared to traditional datacenters. The savings came from less-expensive manufacturing of its first OCP motherboard server and from its datacenters' reduced electricity use. Facebook saves energy in its design of both equipment and datacenter facilities. The latter have massive air-flow handling and air-cooling techniques that allow ambient air to cool the equipment without air conditioning.

"We've saved the equivalent of the electricity to supply 40,000 homes," said Zuckerberg in an interview with O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly. The reduced energy use reflects a Facebook contribution to the environment equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road.

Bill Laing, corporate VP of Microsoft's Servers and Cloud unit, came up with some big numbers of his own. Microsoft has invested over $1 billion in cloud datacenters, which contain 1 million servers, he said. At the OCP Summit, Microsoft donated its design of a 12u cloud server that mixes layers of CPU and storage blades.

Cade Metz, a senior editor at Wired, carried the big numbers a step forward as he moderated a panel on the future of open-source hardware in networking. Martin Casado, chief network architect for VMware, said he's watched networking move from highly proprietary, inflexible sets of devices that tie a customer to a vendor, to a field where network switches may be programmed and reprogrammed dynamically throughout the day. "Five years ago, I was a lot more pessimistic about the future of networking," said Casado.

Metz deadpanned, "$1.26 billion later, he's more optimistic" to the laughter of the audience. Casado sold his networking startup Nicira to VMware in 2012 for that amount. He and fellow panelists agreed that Open Compute Project specs will allow an OCP-specified set of switch designs to be produced by a variety of manufacturers and used in software-defined networks.

I refer to AMD's Seattle as a motherboard. It's more accurately described as a system on a chip, or a CPU with special added features, such as its Freedom Fabric that can connect it directly to 5 petabytes of disk. Seattle will be sampled in the first quarter, generally available in the second half. It is a 64-bit ARM Cortex CPU with eight cores, to be followed by a 16-core version.

The willingness to experiment with new approaches seems very high, which plays to these new models. Companies see the chance for a private cloud architecture that's more flexible, responsive, and cheaper. Does Open Compute help them get there? That needs to be the story if OCP is going to move beyond the web and banking giants.

Laurie, You're right. Disruption in the server market is the goal. It's not clear whether Open Compute will achieve it exactly the way that it's amining to. The Open Compute storage and networking projects are catching a marketplace that is more calcified than servers. Intel, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco and Fujitsu will remain formidable server makers and competitors.

"By 2019, ARM will command 25% of the server market". Boy that seems pretty out there to me. Just because Intel is hot on wearables and Internet of Things does not mean it will let that kind of server marketshare slide. Still, the level of disruption in the server marketplace right now is stunning.

Respondents are on a roll: 53% brought their private clouds from concept to production in less than one year, and 60% ­extend their clouds across multiple datacenters. But expertise is scarce, with 51% saying acquiring skilled employees is a roadblock.

Most -- 77% -- of respondents to our 2014 Private Cloud Survey, all from companies with 50 or more employees, have clouds in place now or are piloting. Those without plans may be left at a disadvantage.